


Little Birds

by Aris



Series: self defense mechanisms [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Anorexia, Body Image, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Depression, Eating Disorders, Growing Up, Homophobic Language, M/M, Victor-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:40:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25884493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aris/pseuds/Aris
Summary: Victor never picked himself up. Victor rotted so far into the ground he had no choice but to reincarnate himself with each season, a program for every person he laid to rest, bouquets thrown at his feet a mockery of a funeral no one truly attended. He trekked a bloody circle, cradled his spilling blood in his cupped hands, overflowing until Victor hadn’t the choice but to step back, assess the gorey path he has trodden, the bloodbaths held by others in his wake.(Or, how victor grows up, and the ingredients between)
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Series: self defense mechanisms [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/611911
Comments: 12
Kudos: 68





	Little Birds

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is not a realistic rep of 90s russia. I pulled from interviews, AMA reddit posts on 90s russia, magazines + queer theory papers but have no expertise or deep knowledge in the area. this was not a time of “plenty” for many russians and i cannot emphasise how victor-centric this view point is. 
> 
> (this fic contains homophobic slurs, and explicit references to eating disorders)
> 
> (can be read standalone, but is technically a prequel in the [self defense mechanisms series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/611911)). none of the events in the fic overlap, however.

His skates were always tattered. Fabric fixes. Industrial glue. But still the best pair grabbed at the first opening of the public skating ring, the earliest customer each morning not garbed in sportswear or bearing an insignia. Earnest. Dedicated.

Small, but very loud, his mother would say, and the attendant had taken an odd shining to him. His size skates were always at the lowest cubby-holes for nimble hands to reach, for others to look over, and sometimes Victor could duck beneath the mans arm and into the changing rooms without a payment. A fond nick to the ear on his way out, maybe, but Victor had always been good at smiling just-so. Just for the skates. Just the right side of charming.

The girls at the gilded school three blocks over had worn these, had tied the fractured metal and broken leather to the apex of their slim ankles, glided across the ice as if it was air. As if they were angels. Wings as hair, blonde and long and flowing behind them, the blaring lights shining past their heads easily mistaken as a halo. 

His mother would trill over their pretty outfits and long locks. Would tug Victors own, as if it she could pull it a few inches longer from the scalp. Pull and pull, a monster from a child. Victor could only stare up, neck strained, craned, eyes blurring the halos into fires, into whiteness, into nothing. The sky as the ground. Above as below. Ice to fluorescent lights.

There was a lot of that, in the 90s.

First, a TV. Then, a copy of Ptychu, passed along a classroom line with snickers. Two girls kissing, ruby red lipstick, tongues mirrored again and again. Besides it, a man in glitter reclining among dimly lit fabric, black lipstick fraying from the inside of his lips.

Victor stares. And stares. 

“If you turn the next page, she is naked.” The boy lent backwards against his desk informs him. His grin is all teeth, all dare, his fist red and paling where it clings to Victors desk - an imperfect impression of a bloodstained fist. A promise.

He turns the page, and he traces the shadow of a woman's breast. It reminds him, horribly, of the late night TV his father watches. Something blurry and seedily lit. Like the new arcades, like the novel shopping centres erupting as if natural disasters from the corpse of old industrial factories, like the signs that appear and disappear every week on the drunken strip between his home and the city. 

He smiles, just-so, and he passes the magazine back a seat.

The legs of the boys chair clash to the floor.

“Faygele,” spits a man on Victors’ way home. 

* * *

Victor takes.

From wherever he can, whenever he can. Shards of conversations, moments of TV, innuendos obscured over the radio, posters, smiles, hints of glitter on skin and magazines girls would roll up once, twice, slide into park bins like a secret. He takes, and he patches them together like old skates, shaves them down to twists, turns, patterns upon paper and crevices upon ice. A shallow sculpture - a living, breathing moment captured so barely one can catch it only as the lights dim, as petals are cleared and collected to rot.

He tries not to look at the finished product - not to see. He dissects it carefully into leaps and spins and landings, arm poses and leg extensions. Yakov can only guide, can only warn for bad weather where Victor is a hurricane. Undeveloped bones and fragile skin do not apply when one is to take the world by storm, when one is to break through a bar raised higher and higher each year.

Russia is booming. There is always more - a sense of it, a taste of it - more to be had. Colours Victor had scarcely seen litter the streets, alien European products stock the shelves alongside bread and butternut. Their foods are strange to the mouth as they are on the tongue - and they come so fast. 

Yakov changes their brand of energy bars. For the inbetweens. Dieting magazines litter the low tables outside offices, propped next to a shopkeepers watchful eyes, glaring down from posters and billboards. Victor remembers, in the vaguest of ways, a lack of food. A shortage of it. Arguments between parents. This is before green and blue plastics.

Now his bars are,  _ fueling the nation _ , and none have the familiar bitterness of homemade jam. Sickly. Tacky on the tongue. They are hard to stomach, but he watches as others indulge in them between their sets, after practice; they have an excess, for the first time. More than they could ask for. More than any of them could ask for; 

And Victor watches the girls above him grow strong, and then big, and then gone. He folds the ends of wrappers over half-chewed protein and grain. He, carefully, lines his practice bag with bars he shares with his mother, with other students. Leftovers, when there are none. This is becoming rarer to him - now - having none. His mother brings home a diet magazine submerged into the sides of a newspaper. His father drinks more, grey cans and sensationalized bottles - they are the worlds best vodka, now, though Victor cannot stand the smell. 

A small blessing, Makkachin is guaranteed a dinner of dog proportions. He is not the scrap-hound he was once jokingly called. His fur glows, diffuses, is soft to the touch. It is all he has to hold, most days.

Victor grows older and Yakov grows harsher as Russia prods its ties with competitive sports as a new nation. He is long-limbed, small boned, an elongated, de-emphasized nothing. There is a horrible, rewarding glory in watching rink mates fade out behind him, puberty shaming them strong and stout. Their greed pushing it further. Victor pays them so little attention it is only in hindsight he notices Yakov’s time ticking more and more to him, competitions won, routines planned to a T. 

There is never a stagnant moment. His first plane ride, his first boat ride - strange tongues and cold medals. To cheers, to boos, to announcers exclaiming “I have never seen anything like this before,” “So young,” ...

“... It’s Victor Nikiforov!”

He wants this more. This everything he can have. Victor has heard not enough his entire life. He has saved school meals for his mother, has worn pass me downs and written three lines per outline on his paper for years in fear of not enough - scrimmaging, smiling and begging his way into things he sees everywhere. That which others would throw away.

It is not fair. That there is everything and nothing, for him. He will step on fingers, fracture ankles, and all that will be left will be his. Victors’. Those his age never hold a candle to him, he finds, and it is painfully clear when they cannot tie their own skates, when they need the touch of their coaches for comfort, reassurance. Victor stands an equal at Yakovs’ side. He feels the cold of the rink entirely, incorporates it within himself, allows it to flow at the tips of his limbs. 

He needs no comfort.

His mother brushes his hair harshly. It feels as if resentment. Victor eats dinner out with friends, salads and waters and lean meats taken from others plates. Medals and money are a different kind of currency, now, and Victor can smile up a storm right up until the point it hits, and the empty in his eyes is too clear. Too real. Girls love it, he knows, no longer a social pariah because of his long hair and petite hands. He is slimmer than them, an envy, a want.

Pretty boys, he hears, pretty boys in bands. On skateboards. Pretty boys, a veiled code among men. Pretty boys in clubs, on stages.

Pretty boys. Little birds. 

Men kiss on the covers of Ptyuch and OM. His teachers rant on the immoral. He bruises his calves with bad landings and the tightness of his laces. He doesn’t glance at energy bars, and he skips his mothers meals cooked with fancy, flashy ingredients. He eats his porridge, and he drinks his water and here he strikes a balance.

Strong. Small. A space wherein he can duck beneath parental fists. Beneath the arms of the old ring owner, bought out by the Olympic team. A space where the veins of his eyelids disappear beneath stage makeup. It is here where he finds a moment for himself, amidst a rush he cannot fathom to slow. 

Victor will not look back. He will not look back, will not hang medals nor trophies, will route around the rink's lobby where his photos lie - he will not look back, not at such a steep incline. A fool climbs only half the mountain for a view. A winner climbs it all. A winner knows there are bigger mountains, across the peak, a winner knows alps lie beyond the clouds. A winner knows it does not get easier, near the top, that the view becomes obscured, the ground sharp and wet - a winner may not know what is to come at the next ridge, but is always certain of that which lies behind -

A fall.

Victor does not intend to fall.

Yakov brings in a nutritionist to the rink. Victor stays late quizzing her on each food he remembers, everything he plans to consume - she is French, her words too light and too fast sometimes to understand. Yakov shows them videos of their competitors, and he points to the angles of their legs and the muscles in their arms. Victors annotates upon pictures in skating magazines. And then, upon himself. He takes from both, from all; long hair bowing around his waist a signature, no longer the leash his mothers twisted nails had pulled on.

It is important in spins that his hair splays just so. That it falls down his body and obscures where curves could be, that he embodies something his competitors are too scared, too bound to consider. He sees, again and again, in his minds eye, glitter, fraying lipstick. A darkness in the eye that he turns away from.

A new millennium does not erase that which lies so heavy on peoples minds. Victor wins the Junior World Championships - of course he wins - he wins in an outfit that bears his body through mesh, with a blemish upon his mouth; he wins, and they place flowers upon his hair, in his arms. The skating world sighs at the bends of his legs, the salient ripples across his ribs. They gasp at the shimmers in his outfit, mesh pulled tight at his stomach, it's a slow wind across his back. No faux bows or billowing sleeves, no give at the fabric of his thighs, no small coat edging beneath his arms -- made to fit, made to show. It would be too scandalous to get past the commission if it were anyone else.

If Victor didn’t know how to smile, just-so.

A picture hits the press. Not only in Russia, but the world. Somehow. He loads it up on the rinks computer. Sees websites, ones he will erase after visiting, wishing he would make it clearer, louder, who he is. European news makes jokes on the drag-show comparisons and Russian reviewers angrily commentating on his sin. There are many of that same image, a smile upon the ice. His age a brazen tag line.

\- a picture of himself upon Xanga. Project shapeshift. Crops of his arms. Of his solar plexus. 

Perfect.

Usernames he had shared responses with discuss his weight as infinitives. The inches around his thighs, waist. How he keeps his hair so long. How he hides how he eats. As if needs to - as if, as if men get eating disorders. Victor is in shape. It is the nature of the sport to neglect. Refine. Sculpt at ones own body.

It is a world away from them.

But he still drinks his water from litre bottles and folds his meats beneath his fork to clear away. Good advice is good advice. What could his nutritionist know that he now does not? It is simple math - in and out.

His father dies. Pytuch officially ends its publication. He frames men kissing and then slips landscapes over them. He smiles, lips sealed, at men in clubs who do not read the tabloids. Who don’t pour over their dial ups. Who don’t comment on the black stains Victor leaves against them when the glitter that departs his skin on nights whisked away from his parents, his coach.

He changes in the locker rooms with a hand quietly over his neck. Showers with strange memories pressed against his back. He cannot risk it. Cannot.

The world begins to go too fast. Has always been getting faster. He holds his titles like fine silks that could slip from between his callouses. He meets others of similar esteem, but never equal, from countries that do not know the cold as he does. Prosperity, heat, abundance and structure. He likes their self-assured confidence, their belief of their infallibility-- they know not how far there is below them. 

They are fun to drink with. To joke with. Victor samples their cultures with a smothered delight, taking and taking and laughing at their ignorance of his own. In some parts of the world, there are kinder words for what Victor is. Worse words, for the food he skips. He pictures himself in France, America, Norway -- where he will only be hurt, denied, rather than killed or imprisoned. A luxury. One he will carve for himself, refine.

And - for all his father is dead, his impression is lasting, true. The streets where his parents grew up change little. The old men still smoke on the doorsteps and mutter for the cold outside the butchers shop. They still yell in heavy slang at women and any head-rearing sight of femininity, a novel anger towards the creeping west among their heavy tongues. There are now only new signs upon crumbling brick, rubbish where Victor would once salvage, homes where there was once emptiness. A pretense over bone.

He is not sad to move out. His mother can more than afford it. He siphons a portion of his winnings to her, keeps his sponsors. Yakov knows her well, and yet her name is not spoken between them. They would greet each other warmly, when Victor was a meal ticket. He is more than that, now. A household name she tries her best to distance from, and he returns the favor. 

Has always done so.

* * *

Yakov’s partner corners him. She is fragile, glass-like, and a self-same hell echoes in the emptiness that pulls bags under her eyes. She is slim in the way of something withered, of something that could not grow even if it was begged to do so. He thinks of the trees that grow in deserts, the corded reaching of their branches, as if they beckon to the heavens themself.

Lillia. He has seen her in magazines, on TV.

She grabs his arm, and he lets her, and their cold skin does not warm one another. Her nails are lined, malnutrition poorly covered under a sheen of polish, the fur she wears upon her shoulders equally a mockery as life as herself. She grabs his arm, and she is shaking. Victor can not feeling a fucking thing.

Victor takes his arm back, they meet eyes, and they never speak again.

It is enough to know.

  
  


* * *

It is then, when Victor has begun to numb, that he appears.

Small. Pale.

But where Victor had once ducked, Yuri shoves. Where Victor had smiled, Yuri scowls, Yuri yells, Yuri demands. In places he had learned to give, Yuri takes, and he takes, and he takes. Builds upon land which is not his, on the shoulders of giants, raised high upon calloused bone. Upon bruise.

And it shows, in more than his rigid shoulders, in more than that snarling lip or frustrated waves. An insecurity reaching a boiling point so blazing it burns at the tip of his tongue, trips off the sparks of his teeth. A belonging he earns for himself, not through charisma or charm, nor from money or pleas, a belonging earned through grit. Through persistence. A dog that will not shake free from its bite, Yuri gnaws desperately at all those around him, at the slightest adversary. He sees a fraction of himself, in Yuri.

Victor remembers it all so well. It is the burning of something real, of something fierce, and it is so bright here, it may well burn Yuri away.

Weakness, if he weren’t a kinder man.

They don’t say faygele anymore. It was taking its last breath when it was spat upon him, died out while competition music rang in Victor’s ears, but they have new words now. Revived words. They will always have words. Things to call them. Something to shame their lack of fear of femininity, no matter how applicable that may be. Something to describe them as other. As different.

Little. Weak. Spilt from Eve’s apple.

Yuri is fairy. Faggot. For daring to exist as a contrast to masculinity.

Yet in this same breath, the foreign media clamor at it. Dote upon it. A new world indeed. What Victor had longed to build for himself, young, stupid, hopeful. He had carved it out for himself only, in the end. Others held the wall. Younger skaters than he. Those who do not hold this bone-deep fear within them.

His cowardice solidified every year he had withdrawn into himself, dodged a pointed question, covered his bruises with a sticky foundation. 

There had never been a good enough reason for anything but silence.

He doesn’t think on it.

(He agrees, then, that if Yuri can measure up on the ice, if Yuri can do what he did better, then maybe he will help. Maybe he will reach down rather than up.

It is not in his nature.)

* * *

It often seems as if every step he takes forward, a new stair is placed beneath it, and he is expected to make the distance, pull himself up after it. Gold falls around his neck, he narrowly avoids the tails of the paparazzi leaving a gay, English nightclub, and the media rejoices yet another world record. He sleeps in hotel rooms, longingly touches at photos of Makkachin, letting his blackened eyes disappear beneath cover-up. Hollow, exciting, alcohol at his tongue and fame at his heel.

Yakov takes Yuri under his wing, Victor’s replacement in-waiting.

He feels, as if, he draws further from people. Outward, up, and away. Age does not settle this restlessness inside him. Physically, he brings people closer, he confides, he laughs,  _ smiles.  _ But there is a waxy outer layer between them, leaves brushing against one another, and his insides remain depthless, stale. He longs for something he cannot name. Some challenge that does not exist, a peace, perhaps, he has yet to greet. That, like a plant grown only in darkness, he is long and weedy and withered, twisted and gangly as he reaches for a light that falls so openly against fellows. 

Washed out, but not washed up. There is no true stability to him other than that which holds his body in place. The ground he treads has grown weary of his weight, thins beneath his blades, warns of an upcoming collapse. But Victor pushes, for there is nothing else to do. Nothing more he can do. 

He restricts, and he stares down hard at sketched out routines. Concepts he will bring to life, movement and emotion infused with an energy he feels he siphons from himself everytime he comes to sit down with his lonely mind, confronts a self he has longed to distance himself from. There is nothing else for him. He feels, outside of skating, empty. A waiting room in a morgue. 

As his years have ticked, thus so has the tiny emptiness that first consumed him in that very first ice ring. The bareness of his childhood, the wanting, the insatiability for more, the hunger that has bitten and chewed at his every desire, teeth dull and blunted from the years of it. What passion that once wound him up, that once lifted him to the heavens, to the bright floodlights above -- it has waned in him, turned to some alien numbness. 

Perhaps he has eaten it out of himself. Or perhaps it has rotted, caught him unawares. Like flies swarming, stealing with them a tiny piece everytime, chipping away at blood and bone until he is dust and skin, dead flowers cut by a sharpened blade. Morbid imagery, the likes of which he has drunk and fucked from his mind for too long that it feels, somehow, unknown in its familiarity. He thinks of the cold determination that had once settled down upon his shoulders, the fierce proclamation that he would have it all. Have everything.

God -- he is so tired, now. Fatigued further than words can reach. At a press conference, he leaves his body, briefly, and realises he knows not how much longer he can do this.

That it is all the he knows, and it has becomes foreign to him.

It is terrifying in its enormity. There has never been anything else. Never. He has been shaped by the ice, its coldness his own, its fragility his strength. He has starved, and he has gorged, and he has emptied himself, systematically, bit by bit, to climb to heights never once set foot upon. He is the best, the finest, that which stands tall above the others, everything he has told his mother he would be. Everything he knew he was always going to be, with that smile, with those dreams.

He has the everything he had wanted as a child, the more he had desired. He has surmounted himself, his beginnings, had dragged himself with claw and fang.

He is here. At the top. And though others approach, there is no looming fear in it. No longer. 

She asks - “What do you have in mind for next season?”

He finds, simply, that he does not care.

  
  


* * *

  
  


He laments. He trains and -

A video.

Victor plays it, in his quiet apartment, limbs and head aching, his only company the rise and fall of Makkachins’ chest.

It is everything that is bygone to him. The blush upon his face, the joy in his eyes, the snap of his wrists, the unadulterated, undiluted joy of sliding into movements copied again and again from a screen, from memory, from hastily drawn sketches on napkins in coffee shops. The way his fingers temple in exertion, excitement, the tremulous purity of the happiness that trips down the plains of his face --

He has it. Yuuri Katsuki has it. That which has slipped from the broken bones surrounding his heart, the core of his marrow, the love, the fury, the excitement - it is etched into his very being.

Victor remembers this program, remembers the emptiness that had soared with metal at his breast, the flower petals that had rotted into the palm of his hands, the adrenaline that barely covered that which gaped dark and unmitigated in his head. Creating that performance, he had thought of what he had once had, had hewn it from bloodied bits and pieces of himself, ling since flayed and lost. Stitched together and forced into something new, something to be puppeteered, his own body just hollow enough to be jerked upon the strings.

But Yuuri -- 

He had felt it. What Yuri has tried to emulate, the sickly shadow of nostalgia razed from it, born anew how it always should have been.

This is it, he realises. The restlessness he has felt, what his dying flames have sparked. And oh, such an inferno has warmed his face with its passing. He has not felt such limberness in years, such rearing  _ eagerness _ . Yakov does not understand. He does not expect him to. He gets the first flight he can, and the snow is familiar, recognisable upon his landing. Makkachins paws sink in deep, and his heart beats too fast at his wrist.

When Victor meets him, it is a gentle light to his parched skin. The ferocity in his gaze, the liveliness that envelops him, so far from the cold and yearning bones buried at the rinks back home. He has always taken. Always destroyed, and trampled, beaten and starved, and such those around him have worn the scars. He does not regret it, does not resent himself, his trail of death. But what lies before him now is different, unprecedented, seedlings in his grasp.

A chance to create, to shape, to lift someone above him, over him. To see heights he has grown bored of. To visit horizons through the lens of another.

It thrills him so deeply that the space inside him rings with it. He has not felt such exhalation, such anticipation since his childhood eyes lay upon those glitter-strewn lips.

He says: “Starting today, I’m your coach.” Because he cannot let this go. Cannot let this crumble.

Yuuri is excitable, nervous, something deerlike yet emboldened in him. They talk, and it is nothing like every love-sick conversation with a fan, and they eat - home cooked food so rich and vibrant it is almost overwhelming in its intensity. Yuuri sits besides him, laughs when he fiddles with the chopsticks and then covers his own mouth. Warmness trickles down his spine, the edges of his mouth pulling in a smile he has not been anything but fake in years. It is a jarring thing in which to fit himself around, this genuineness that comes forth, and he tries not to let the tremble in his hand show. 

It is an indulgence.

Victor has never known what it is to be full. Sated. Has never known anything but longing;  but here, Yuuri at his side, his worries tired and old but dulling to give way to something new, something golden, he thinks:

This may be it.

(When he wakes up - he is hungry, and he realises - it is the first time he has ever  _ wanted  _ food.  _ Wanted _ to eat. That he is free from his carefully chosen safe foods, from his self imposed structure, from the medical dissection of every macro nutrient and dietary breakdown - he wants this food because it is  _ good _ . Because he does not have a next training session, a next mask to slip into, a next self to forge. Because he can taste it, finally, upon his tongue.

Because, now, when he looks down from upon where he stands, the heights he has climbed upon blood and bruise, he sees Yuuri two steps behind him, one hand reached towards him.

He takes it.)

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> if you havent already, you can ready more in the [self defense mechanisms series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/611911)), but these fics focus on yuri plisetsky
> 
> to me, victor is a character that struggles with empathy. i wanted to add more context him so that his actions in curdled milk may be better understood (i.e. why he said that things he said at the end -- that while they appear cold, theyre completely reasonable and logical things to say, just not very tactful)
> 
> (faygele is yiddish for 'little bird' which doubled as a slur for a gay man. in 90s russia, there was a tiny cross-section of people who would have used it. you can read an interesting piece of work about the words roots and use [here](https://eppylover.livejournal.com/230136.html), and also listen to the song [ little birds by neutral milk hotel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSdpoI42hs) bc it slaps)
> 
> thank you for reading! any comments or feedback is appreciated SO much
> 
> [curdled milk playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3If1CyOoFSPcXNymiCWerA?si=dADvaw-bSsWd-c5Nyixk0g)  
> [ tumblr ](https://bakugoz.tumblr.com/)


End file.
